All the news I don’t have time to read
Yesterday, I saw an article somewhere about Brijit, a new website that abstracts newspaper and magazine articles down to 100 words or less, and rates them. The idea is that it’s news for people who don’t have time to read, or something. Anyone can sign up to write abstracts for them, and they pay $5 a pop if they use them.
It’s certainly true that my to-read pile grows far faster than I can keep up with. But I’m not convinced that this is a solution. For one thing, it covers mostly sources that I actually do keep up with — I don’t read the NY Times cover to cover, but I usually look at the front page, and scan the list of "most emailed" articles, and I think I get as much out of that as I would out of the Brijit summaries.
My favorite source for telling me what I would like to read if I had another 5 hours a day is Jenny Davidson at Light Reading. She almost never suggests things that I’ve already read, and often includes a few paragraphs that capture the heart of the article.
On a related note, she recently linked to an interview with Pierre Bayard, the author of the wonderfully named book "How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read."
(No book review today — I’m in the middle of 3 different books, and not far enough along to talk about any of them. I did watch the movie of Maurice last week; I think it was a mistake to watch it right after reading Birdsong, because all I could think about was that they were all doomed.)
